METHUSELAH ARCHIVE PRACTITIONERS / JOHANNA BRANDT
Black-and-white studio portrait of a woman with curled upswept hair, wearing a patterned wrap over a light dress with a small pendant necklace, looking slightly off-camera.
PUBLIC DOMAIN source

Johanna Brandt

individual · Pretoria, South Africa; New York City, United States
lived:1876–1964
active:1925–1948
type:individual
role:promoter
location:Pretoria, South Africa; New York City, United States
eventual status:quietly_faded
FINANCIAL CONFLICTS
Brandt wrote and sold The Grape Cure (1928) and set up the Harmony Healing Centre in New York City to promote it; after the Centre passed to other operators, Jessie Springer distributed Brandt's book and advertised grape juices and grape concentrates for sale under the Centre's name, and the FTC's 1940 order specifically targeted misrepresentations used to sell those products and the book (Quackwatch).
INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED
NOTES

Johanna Brandt (1876-1964), born Johanna van Warmelo in Heidelberg, Transvaal, wrote a 1913 memoir describing her own account of intelligence and courier work for the Boer side during the Second Boer War (1899-1902); a 2021 Wellcome Collection article independently describes her as a wartime “Nationalist and spy”. She later trained as a naturopath and, after years of self-treating gastric symptoms with fasting, left South Africa on 4 July 1927 to promote a diet of grapes alone as a cure for cancer and other diseases, reaching New York at the end of November 1927 after lecture stops and delays in England and Europe, and publishing The Grape Cure in 1928 and founding the Harmony Healing Centre in New York City. The American Medical Association’s records show the Centre was charged with practicing medicine without a license; the operation passed through F. W. Collins of the First National University of Naturopathy and then Jessie Springer, who advertised grape juices and concentrates for sale, before the Federal Trade Commission ordered the operation’s misrepresentations discontinued on March 15, 1940. By 1950 the Centre had disappeared from the New York telephone directory, and a 1954 source placed Brandt back in South Africa as a missionary (Quackwatch).